Do you remember being seventeen? I was not exactly an upstanding member of society at that age. At seventeen, Caleb Adams has his first gallery show at Ketchup City Creative, in collaboration with forty-nine-year-old abstract painter Jacki Temple.
The result is an intergenerational conversation between two artists with solid visions and bold, recognizable styles. They make a good pair because of the dualities in both of their work: Temple uses chaotic, gestural marks that have an underlying order to them, where Adams favors more rigid, crisp shapes that hide a chaotic underbelly. One wonders if maybe that’s the difference between adolescence and adulthood. Adults’ lives can be chaotic, but you learn to become more comfortable with it. For teens, every break in order is a devastating blow. Adams mentioned one painting took inspiration from the first heartbreak and the first death in his family he experienced.
Temple’s use of color is mesmerizing. She really shines when she uses a deep, cerulean blue that brings to mind the bottom of the ocean. Her work has both a rawness and a control to it. There’s a lot of playfulness in No Better Moment. You get the sense that the artists enjoyed the process. They both paint with a confident hand, and the show implicitly asks the question that if you didn’t know, who would you think was seventeen and who would you think was forty-nine?
It’s refreshing to see a show that leans so heavily into abstraction. No figures in sight, only colors and shapes. The art isn’t conceptual—it just asks you to look at it and bring your associations to it. From Adams, I got the inspiration of Ellsworth Kelly or Sol LeWitt.
The only place where the human form creeps in is in a set of Polaroids entitled Caleb’s View that Adams then painted over reminded me of filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who painted over his film to create abstract cinema works. The polaroids are on a wall opposite Jacki’s View, small canvases that Temple painted on. No Better Moment has something in it for everyone, small canvases, big canvases, bright, dark, and everything in between. At a time when generational divides are more chasmic than ever, there’s no better moment for a show like this.
No Better Moment is open by appointment through April at Ketchup City Creative (612 Main Street).
For more intergenerational dialogue, check out Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). This month’s articles are published with support from The Frick Pittsburgh for Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). As Zach Hunley wrote in Petrichor: “When viewing the work of Kara Walker, you are bearing witness to history and time compounded.” Revisit the past and rethink the present now at the Frick Art Museum.
PETRICHOR 
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